Manhunting

Seven years is a long time to spend obsessing over men. Seven years, for anyone, is a long time to spend talking to football fans, porn actors, war veterans, film stars, astronauts, shipbuilders, fundamentalist Christians, gang members, lads' magazine editors and teenage boys. Seven years is an especially long time if you're talking to those men about their masculinity - and you happen to be one of the leading feminists of your generation.

Susan Faludi - author of 1991's Backlash, a brilliant documentation of the attempts made to halt women's progress towards equality - has turned her attention to the opposite sex. Her new book, Stiffed, looks at men who feel as if they are in crisis even though they run the country; men who feel angry, disaffected or betrayed by their lack of individual power and influence. It's not a new issue; underachieving boys, deserting fathers, Viagra, the boom in male plastic surgery and cosmetics, the explosion of young male suicide and crime: the concept of a male crisis is a dominant theme of the decade. What is new is Faludi's analysis. Unlike some writers, she does not blame women's progress for men's demise, nor masculinity on the rampage. The men she spoke to led her to conclude that the cause is a fundamental shift in society - and so neither feminism nor men behaving badly is to blame.

Rather than asserting assumed truths, Faludi, who met her interviewees on many separate occasions, just sat back and listened: about their dashed hopes, their expectations, their disillusionments, their sense of betrayal. "Men are seen as this great lump," she says, "that they're all privileged, they're all entitled, they're all powerful - none of which, in fact, is true." It is probably not the book you might expect a feminist to write about men. People had misconceptions. "I'd meet women and they'd say, ïOh, you're writing a book on men, well I've just got divorced and my husband's a shit, you should really write about my husband.' But that's not the point at all. What I was trying to do was understand things from men's perspective."

The idea came, says Faludi, when she was writing Backlash. "By the end I thought that, while I'd documented the evidence that there was this counter-reaction to women's equality, I hadn't really sorted out in my mind why there was all this male resistance and male anger towards women. When people read Backlash, they'd say, well, why are men this way? And I'd come up with some glib, three-line response which wasn't very satisfactory to me and made me realise how confused I was about that question. And how you can't really do anything about a backlash until you're able to answer a question like that."

What she found on her listening tour of men was a feeling of irrelevance: a profound sense that yesterday's fathers had prepared their sons - the men of today - to enter a completely different world from the one they ended up in. By this she does not mean just the economic shift from manufacturing to service, or from industry to electronic technology, or the irony of men creating the machines that would replace them. It goes deeper than that.

"We have changed fundamentally," writes Faludi, "from a society that produced a culture to a culture rooted in no real society at all. The culture we live in today pretends that media can nurture society, but our new public spaces, our ïelectronic town squares' and ïcyber-communities' and publicity mills and celebrity industries, are a dismal substitute for the real thing." This breakdown of society, she says, has hit men hard - because they have been used to playing a useful role. "Where once we lived in a society in which men in particular participated by being useful in public life," she writes, "we now are surrounded by a culture in which people play almost no functional public roles. The old model of masculinity showed men how to be part of a larger social system. It gave them a context and it promised them that their social contributions were the price of admission to the realm of adult manhood. That kind of manhood required a society in order to prove itself. All of the traditional domains in which men pursued authority and power - politics, religion, the military, the community, and the household - are societal."

So unlike his father, today's man grew up with no honourable war to fight (no fascist-defeating second world war) and no frontiers to break (only the final frontier, space, which turned out to be nothing at all); he did not have a job for life, or even a useful sort of job; he couldn't count on being a useful member of his family; even his local football team would reward his loyalty and commitment with high ticket prices which would keep him away from the players he loved.

All that is left then, says Faludi - if you can't get your masculine confidence from work, family or having a place in your community - is the physical. Much later than women, men have had to try to find a place in "ornamental culture", where appearance, sex appeal and celebrity - however tenuous - is what counts, is what makes you feel powerful. She writes: "In truth, despite all their wartime heroics, the fathers abandoned their sons, however inadvertently, in an image-based, commercial-ruled world that they had largely created in their post-war haste to embrace the good life."

That image-obsessed world is one with which women are very familiar, and so it has feminine connotations - confusing for men used to traditional forms of masculinity. But it is also one of which women have developed an understanding that it is fun but ultimately empty - celebrity and image simply do not leave you with a sense of purpose in the way that more rooted, "useful" forms of identity do. The internet cannot offer a community; celebrity leads nowhere fulfilling; the television cannot talk back. The ornamental culture may dazzle, but its promises are empty. So institutions where men felt some sense of belonging have been swept away, replaced by "visual spectacles which they can only watch".

Faludi writes: "The internal qualities once said to embody manhood - surefootedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose - are merchandised back to men to enhance their manliness. The more productive aspects of manhood, such as building or cultivating or contributing to a society, couldn't establish a foothold on the shiny flat surface of a commercial culture, a looking-glass before which men could only act out a crude semblance of masculinity." And the emptiness, the sense of irrelevance? "In a celebrity culture, earnestness about social and political change is replaced by a pose of ïirony' that is really just a sullen and helpless paralysis."

Susan Faludi speaks with a knowledge and authority greater than her years - she is 40 - but she has the bright-eyed, gamine appearance of someone much younger. Her manner, too, suggests youth, until you realise that her shyness - occasional awkward interruptions, spontaneous nervous giggles - masks a friendly, confident voice and sardonic wit. We meet for dinner in a Los Angeles restaurant where I decide the number of courses (two, though I think she might have preferred one, plus decaff) but she chooses the wine (Californian chardonnay).

She grew up in Yorktown Heights, a suburb of New York, where, she says, "all the women were playing the happy housewife routine - except nobody was happy". It was the sort of neighbourhood that Betty Friedan blew apart with The Feminine Mystique - a book that greatly influenced Faludi's mother, Marilyn. (Marilyn was already politically active in a local kind of way - she once blocked a petition trying to stop a black family from moving into their area.) Faludi's father, meanwhile - Steven, a Hungarian Jew who hid from the Nazis in Budapest cellars for the whole of the second world war - had a rather traditional view of a wife's duties, typical of the time. As the only Jewish family in an overwhelmingly Catholic area, Faludi describes her parents as "the neighbourhood weirdos: my father had a thick accent and my mother was rather bohemian. We lived in suburbia, but I think my mother would have been happier in Greenwich Village." They divorced when Susan was a teenager; her mother now works as an editor in New York, and her father has returned to Hungary. Faludi herself lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, Russ Rymer, also a writer.

Faludi describes her teenage self as "the girl with the glasses", but it sounds as if she was as much a troublemaker as school swot. At age 12, she conducted a survey of her classmates that revealed that most of them were in favour of legalised abortion and opposed to the war in Vietnam: at the next PTA meeting, the head of the rabidly right-wing John Birch Society alleged that she had "incited communism". She later wrote an essay in the school newspaper about how the separation of church and state had been violated in the school; at Harvard, where she won a scholarship, she wrote an article on sexual harassment, naming a professor. "He came up to me and said, ïI'm just an effervescent kind of guy.' But he'd been doing it for 20 years." The university pleaded with Faludi's editor not to run the story; but it ran, and the professor was forced to take leave of absence.

There has clearly always been an interesting duality about Faludi's personality and her work. The girl with the glasses who caused trouble at school became the reporter on the business-led Wall Street Journal who won a Pulitzer for an article on the human cost of a buyout of the supermarket chain Safeway; she's the writer who decries the image-based culture who lives in its epicentre, Hollywood; the author who abhors celebrity who has appeared on the cover of many US magazines; the feminist who writes about men.

She is part of the culture she is criticising - a reason, perhaps, for her success.

There is, too, a sort of symmetrical duality about her books. Backlash was prompted by an article in Newsweek stating that single women were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married - a "fact'" that was widely quoted but that was proved by Faludi to be an outright lie. (In another point of symmetry, Newsweek is serialising Stiffed in America and Faludi is now a columnist.) Backlash, which looked at popular culture and its hype about men shortages, infertility and the "blight" of being a career woman, was a highly statistical analysis - in it, Faludi dissected the evidence with forensic care, amassing the facts. In Stiffed, by contrast, she simply got men to talk.

"It occurred to me that Backlash was like a legal brief saying, ïI've done this discovery. Here are the facts' - a ïmale' approach to a female crisis," she says. "Whereas Stiffed is a ïfemale' approach to a male crisis in that it tells stories, narratives: it's more about listening to people than telling people what the facts are. Maybe those two halves fit together - maybe you need the feminine to understand the masculine, and vice versa."

So how did Faludi get these men to talk? The idea of a crusading feminist turning up on a man's doorstep and asking him to speak honestly about how he feels about being a man is an intriguing one. What about Sylvester Stallone, for example Ü the very embodiment of male ornamental culture? "It was a battle to get an interview with him in the first place, but once we began talking he was so responsive. Most people who interview him ask him questions about the latest action movie, which he couldn't give a damn about, or about his girl trouble, or make fun of him. But he's a much more complicated character, and he had a lot to say. I think he symbolises the terrible trap that men are in - he is the action hero, the emblem of ornamental masculinity, and if he finds it so burdensome that he'll turn away from a multi-million dollar contract and reject that role, then it can't be a great way to be. He'd thought a lot about what it means to be a man in an ornamental world.

"I think he appreciated someone listening to him. But that's true not just of Stallone but of so many men I spoke to. I got the feeling that no one had ever listened to them. You know: you go out, bring home the bacon, shut up and do as you're told - and you're supposed to be the dominant one." She thinks they spoke to her because no one else had ever asked? "Yes, but also I put them in quite a safe position: I wasn't their wife, I wasn't their girlfriend, I was just somebody who was actually interested in what they thought."

The narratives are powerful; Faludi's writing is thorough and clear, a legacy of her journalistic background - she has worked at the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Constitution and the New York Times, as well as the Wall Street Journal; one former editor said of her, "The dirty little secret about Susan Faludi is that she works harder than just about any reporter I've ever known." The characters in Stiffed linger in the mind as if from a novel, and what is extraordinary is that they seem to be saying the same thing; the reader feels as if they've encountered everyman. "I wanted their humanity to be recognised regardless of whether they're militiamen or porn actors," says Faludi.

Take TT Boy, a porn actor famed for abusing the actresses he works with. At the shoot Faludi attended, the woman he was having sex with kept having to apply make-up to her bruised legs. TT Boy says things like, "I'm just a guy who wants to fuck the shit out of all those girls. Just fuck ïem to death." His message to female porn stars is: "You don't want to work with me. I'll beat your boyfriends up and spit in their faces. That's what I think of you bitches, and then I'll kick you in the head." Yet Faludi searches for some humanity in TT Boy - and she finds it: his father beat him up, he exists as if constantly in thrall to the camera, and in his home, where he lives alone and was not expecting any guests, he had the table set for four. "I just thought it looked homey," he says.

Does Faludi think she was perhaps too kind, too understanding, to men like him? Should we really care to search for the humanity in violent misogynists like TT Boy? "It's not like I'm advocating what he says," she says. "But we have to understand these men. It's crucial for society not simply to denounce but to figure out what the hell's going on. Admittedly, there's a fine line between listening to somebody and becoming a mouthpiece for them. But I was trying to figure out how the world looks from the eyes of men who feel they've been betrayed. Not to say they're right, but to listen to what they think."

What about ordinary men, though - does she think that they will relate to extreme misogynists like TT Boy? Will they care about the body-image problems of someone as successful as Stallone, or the behaviour of teenage boys who had sex for points (one point for each woman) and were arrested for rape? Do they have enough in common with them? "It all affects ordinary men as much as it affects Sylvester Stallone," she says. "I spoke to many ordinary guys, and they are in the book. But I also spoke to a lot of men at the extremes because they are men at crisis point. I was trying to figure out why men are in crisis, so I went to where it was most acute. With these men, I think you can see in high relief what a lot of other men are contending in a quieter register."

The American emphasis of the book might be seen as a problem for British readers; for a start, we have no Vietnam, which Faludi calls "the central masculine crisis of a generation". But, as she points out, The Full Monty - a film that, in its story about the breakdown of men's usefulness to society and their refuge in the feminine ornamental (stripping), could be seen as the popular embodiment of Faludi's thesis - was British. And lads' magazines, a phenomenon now taking the New York publishing world by storm, were exported from here. There are striking parallels, too: while California's Long Beach shipyard has been turned into a movie set, the Caphouse Colliery near Wakefield has been turned into the National Coalmining Museum; while the Cleveland Browns football team relocates to Baltimore, leaving loyal fans behind, Manchester United, England's premier football team, can withdraw from the FA Cup, England's premier football tournament.

There is a real sense of longing in the book; an awareness of a time, a society, that has been lost. But is that unrealistic? We are always being told that the internet, however socially disastrous, is the future; isn't manufacturing in the West dead? "It's not actually dead," she says. "It's just being done in other countries. Some of it is gone forever, yes, through automation and technology. But if you think about it, the same sort of apocalypse was faced at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which in its way destroyed agrarian community life. But, eventually, the response to that created communities - people formed unions and worker organisations in order to struggle with this economic force that was devastating people's lives."

I wonder if writing the book has altered her view on feminism. "In some ways, my ideological view is only strengthened in that this is not a refutation of feminism, it's an extension of it," she says. "Feminism is about looking at what social and cultural forces do to women; I was trying to do the same thing with men. In a way I'm trying to get Stiffed to do for men what Backlash did for women."

Early on in her research she realised that men's resistance to female change, although the springboard for Stiffed, was not the point. The issue was what had happened to men; how men responded to what had happened to women was only a symptom.

"I think my take on the so-called sex war has altered," she says. "I've always thought that we reached the point long ago where we are spinning our wheels. You know, men and women throwing barbs across the barbed wire fence - that clearly isn't going to get us anywhere. I came out of the book thinking that men and women aren't really on other sides in this war; it's a struggle against a culture that is crushing both sexes. In that way, men who want to break out of this and feminist-minded women are each others' greatest allies instead of each others' antagonists."

It is, says Faludi, all about feeling useful. The men of today, who've never fought in a just war, "wish they'd been in a situation where they were really essential. If men could give up the idea of dominance, they could take up something a lot more fulfilling - a role where you feel needed." She says that feeling "masculine" is really just about feeling good about being a human being - feeling that you have a relevance, some straight- forward sense of usefulness to your community. Isn't that what women want, too? It is, says Faludi, up to women and men to change the image-obsessed culture, and forge a new, equal, worthwhile future together.

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